The FY 1999 Budget Request for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Activity is $150.26 million, an increase of $19.60 million, or 15.0 percent, over the FY 1998 Current Plan of $130.66 million.
 

The Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Activity supports research to build fundamental scientific knowledge about human characteristics and behavior. SBE also supports the Foundation’s international activities, providing U.S. scientists and engineers with access to centers of excellence in science and engineering research and education throughout the world. To improve understanding of the science and engineering enterprise, SBE provides informational tools for tracking the human and institutional resources that make up the nation’s science and engineering infrastructure.

NSF is one of the main sources of support for fundamental research in the social, behavioral and economic sciences. This work advances our scientific knowledge of human social and cognitive behavior, and social and economic systems and organizations. For some fields such as anthropology, archaeology and political science, NSF supports essentially all of the federally-funded basic scientific research. In other fields, such as sociology and social psychology, the proportion is more than half. In economics, NSF supports over one third of the field’s federally-funded basic research. The 1997 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Robert C. Merton of Harvard University, a researcher supported in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Research (SBER) Subactivity. Merton shared the award with Myron S. Scholes, Stanford University, for their work on developing a new method to determine the value of derivatives. Their methodology has paved the way for generating new areas of research for economic valuations, new types of financial instruments and facilitating more efficient risk management in society.

Through the International Cooperative Scientific Activities (INT) Subactivity, NSF provides international research opportunities for U.S. scientists and engineers and promotes new partnerships with their foreign colleagues. INT also supports a variety of activities enabling the next generation of U.S. researchers to gain a global outlook through international research experiences early in their careers.

The Science Resources Studies (SRS) Subactivity is the nation’s primary source of quantitative data on the inputs, outputs, impacts, partnerships and linkages of the science and engineering enterprise. SRS designs, collects, analyzes and disseminates data on U.S. and international resources devoted to science and technology. SRS's mission is to provide policymakers, researchers, and other decision-makers with high quality data and analyses for making informed decisions about the nation's science and technology.
 

Key Program Functions

SBE supports its new and ongoing activities through the following key program functions:
 

¹ Includes only costs charged to the Research and Related Appropriation.

Research projects funded by SBE typically include support for individuals and small groups of researchers, along with associated costs for graduate and undergraduate student assistants, postdoctoral associates, supplies, and equipment. SBE also supports multiple-investigator research centers, multi-user research collections, and research instrumentation. Over 85 percent of SBE's funding is directed to Research Project Support. Over 1800 awards are made each year, with an average annual award size of about $52,900 and a duration of approximately 2 years.

FY 1999 estimated support for research projects totals $131.0 million, a $18.07 million increase over the FY 1998 Current Plan. The increased funding will be directed primarily toward research on Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI), Life in Earth's Environment (LEE), Educating for the Future (EFF), and research on the acquisition, development, and deployment of human capital through the Human Capital Initiative (HCI). SBE will also seek to increase both the average size and the duration of awards.

SBE support of the U.S.- Mexico Foundation for Science will increase to a total of $2.0 million.

Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI): In FY 1999, SBE will include an increase of $11.88 million for KDI. Projects to be supported with this increment include:

• Knowledge Networking: ($6.90 million) Research on social aspects of information technology, including intellectual property issues, ethics of the use of information technology and demographic and economic aspects of access to information technology. Knowledge Networking research applications will include international research networks to enable distributed collaborations, virtual international research centers, web-based collaboratories, and digital libraries.
• Learning and Intelligent Systems: ($4.0 million) Basic research to expand understanding of human and artificial cognition, through new measurement technologies and interdisciplinary approaches, including a Center for research and education on the brain and cognition.
• New Challenges to Computation: ($1.0 million) Research to support innovative computational approaches to social and behavioral science, especially integration of computational instrumentation into experimental laboratory methodologies.

• Urban Communities: ($1.80 million) Research will be increased on topics such as regional governance and urban management, on sustainable urban communities, and on determinants of highly participatory urban communities;
• Human Dimensions of Global Change: ($2.04 million) Studies of human adaptation to environmental change, and environmental social science research focused on common pool resources;
• Also included in LEE is an increase ($2.46 million) in basic research support on human-environmental interactions, including sustainable development and appropriate technologies, and on natural hazards prediction and mitigation. The increase will also support international long-term ecological research and research on biodiversity.

• Integration of Research and Education: ($1.10 million) an increase for the Foundation-wide Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program and for the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program and other innovative efforts to support young investigators.
• Children’s Research Initiative: ($5.50 million) will support basic research focused on the study of neural and behavioral correlates of children’s learning, including the contexts that enhance or delay learning, the role of new technologies in learning, and how teaching methods and curricula affect learning. The new programmatic focus will also include a center for research on children’s learning.
• Learning Technologies: ($2.0 million) for participation in a Foundation-wide initiative on Education and Training Technologies. This initiative, in partnership with the Department of Education, will support basic research efforts on educationally relevant technologies; research aimed at developing educational software and technology-enabled pedagogy; and studies to determine the most effective educational approaches and practices.
• In addition, the INT Subactivity ($300,000) will send graduate students overseas to experience emerging scientific and engineering research opportunities around the world, enabling the next generation of U.S. researchers to have a more global perspective.

Award Size and Duration. In FY 1999, SBE will implement efforts to address Foundation-wide concerns about grant sizes by increasing the average size and duration of the awards and providing more support for researchers, with particular attention to new investigators. These efforts will also contribute to increasing the efficiency of the Foundation's merit review process and achieve greater cost-effectiveness for both NSF and the university community.

SBE supports multi-disciplinary research, training and data dissemination through a number of research centers in which the social, behavioral, and economic sciences are the core approaches.
 

¹ FY 1997 funding for National Consortium for Violence Research shown on annualized basis.

• The STC for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, funded jointly by SBE and the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Activity, facilitates collaborations among academic and industrial researchers and students from a variety of disciplines. By investigating language acquisition and processing, perception, and computation in humans and machines, the Center provides a basis for advances in machine intelligence, human learning, and human perception of computer-generated information.
• SBE supports the National Consortium for Violence Research. The center has three integrated missions: supporting research on the causes of violent behavior, encouraging young scientists, especially minorities, to enter this field of research, and disseminating research results and other valuable information to a diversity of research and policy communities.
• The SBE-supported National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research at the University of Tennessee uses interdisciplinary research teams to synthesize data from existing research and to develop information tools for analysis of environmental issues.
• Long-standing support for the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis has resulted in great advances in the conceptual basis and technical capability of geographic information systems (GIS): improved methods for storing and displaying spatial data, better statistical treatment of two- and three-dimensional data, principles behind the use of spatial relations as visual and expository analogs to other relationships, and better understanding of the difficulties in moving data among different data bases and analysis software.

• Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University. CIPEC's primary focus is a long-term study of how institutions and humans at the household and community level affect deforestation and replacement. CIPEC also addresses the national need for training doctoral-level environmental social scientists in rigorous disciplinary methods and the development of interdisciplinary skills.
• Carnegie Mellon Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change conducts research on global change issues, fosters educational services for citizen groups and schools, promotes worldwide discourse on global change issues among researchers and the public, and encourages collaboration between social and natural scientists.

Research Infrastructure: Instrumentation and Large Data Bases. Instrumentation support has an important and expanding role in research conducted in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. SBE support for advanced computer systems is needed to enable the scale and complexity of multi-disciplinary, team research. Advances in instrumentation have permitted research breakthroughs in understanding the processes of human adaptation through improved dating of archeological materials; preservation and analysis of human genetic materials; and new methods for studying physiological aspects of human cognition, perception and decision making. SBE supports long-term projects to develop longitudinal data required to track social, political, and economic change. The General Social Survey, the National Election Studies, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics provide valuable data for research into the very nature of American life and institutions. During FY 1999, NSF will seek to develop additional data infrastructure and linkages among American and international data.

Education and Training
 

Support for Education and Training totals $17.67 million in FY 1999, an increment of $1.45 million over FY 1998. Education and training programs are supported across the SBE Activity. Within the SBER Subactivity, the focus is on developing advanced research skills for graduate students and enhancing the skills of experienced researchers and educators. SBER also emphasizes research opportunities for undergraduates, by exposing a wide population of students to research methods, findings, and training opportunities in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences.

Post-doctoral training is supported through both the SBER and INT Subactivities. INT supports international postdoctoral fellowships and international opportunities for graduate students, such as the Summer Institutes in Japan and Korea. These programs give U.S. science and engineering graduate students research experiences at foreign academic, government, and corporate research institutions. INT programs emphasize international collaborative experiences for U.S. researchers early in their careers.

Funding for the Science Resources Studies (SRS) Subactivity totals $14.85 million in FY 1999, an increase of $1.35 million over FY 1998. The Science Resources Studies (SRS) Subactivity collects data on science and engineering students and graduates by field, relationships between education and employment, employment activities of scientists and engineers, foreign participation in U.S. education and employment, and the experiences of underrepresented groups. In FY 1999, SRS will continue to design, develop, and implement new data sources on graduate education and its outcomes in the U.S..

Administration and Management

The Administration and Management key program function includes the cost of Intergovernmental Personnel Act appointments and contractors performing administrative functions.